Most conventional recycling is performed for manufactured goods such as paper, plastics in aggregate, or metal in aggregate, but is not conducted by part or component of finished products. Significant energy is required for a factory or manufacturer to make individual parts or components. If such parts or components are improperly aggregated in the recycling process, a significant amount of their value can easily be lost. However, information about a finished product and its components is typically not readily accessible or otherwise known prior to processing the finished product for repair, maintenance, or recycling. In addition, an excessive volume of disposed components, parts, and other materials presents a daunting challenge for manual sorting processes. These manual processes simply cannot handle the volume of disposed items and do not possess the requisite capability to process the disposed items in a cost effective and efficient way. In many cases, the energy and manual labor information identification costs to identify and process disposed items, including potentially millions of heterogeneous items, can substantially outweigh the benefits of repairing, repurposing or recycling the items. Accordingly, many items simply go to waste.
FIG. 1A illustrates an example of a computer system 2 that has been disposed of and is now a potential candidate for refurbishment, repair or recycling. In this example, the computer system 2 represents a finished product having multiple components and potentially sub-components. As shown, the computer system 2 includes a case 4, a monitor 6, a keyboard 8, and speakers 10. In addition, the case 4 may serve as an enclosure for a variety of sub-components and materials of the computer system 2. These may include hard drive 12 or other memory devices, sound or video cards 14, a mainboard 16, a power supply 18, a cooling fan 20, and/or a variety of other parts or materials 22. From this example, it can be seen that many different types of components can comprise a finished product. Accordingly, for recycling purposes it can be very beneficial to have readily accessible and actionable knowledge of a finished product and its potentially numerous and varied components.
Therefore, enhanced tools and techniques are needed to process a significant volume of disposed items, to capture and communicate essential information about finished products and their components and materials, and to make consistent repair or recycle determinations. One particular long-felt and unsatisfied need is how to make such determinations with sufficient granularity, such as by recycling per component or per quantity of material based on economic calculations.